CIS: No Evidence of COVID Screening or Quarantine for Arriving Refugees

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

And, as of June 17th, the UN/IOM has begun processing refugees to be distributed throughout the west after a brief suspension of the UN/US Refugee Admissions Program.

Checking the data at the Refugee Processing Center, I see that we have admitted another 121 refugees in the two weeks since the hold on resettlement was lifted. In another couple of weeks we should be seeing that number jump as plane tickets are distributed in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Central and South America.

Just so you know the largest ‘welcoming’ states were California, Illinois and Florida.  Here is where they went:

During the worst health and economic crisis America has faced in many of our lifetimes, more poor and possibly sick refugees are being flown into a town near you!

 

Now to Nayla Rush’s excellent analysis of the health and economic consequences of moving more third worlders to America amid the arguably unprecedented time in US history when every American is worried about getting sick and terrified about being unemployed.

The whole issue of refugee health has been given short shrift throughout the entire time I’ve been writing RRW, so it is no surprise that health concerns are not given serious consideration now! 

I have 376 posts in my ‘health issues’ category and figured that it would take some rich peoples’ kids coming home with TB before the public would wake up to what we are doing.

From the Center for Immigration Studies:

Refugee Placement and Medical Concerns Amid a Covid-19 Pandemic and an Economic Crisis

Contagious diseases are key in the determination of inadmissibility to the United States. The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) requires all refugees applying for U.S. immigration to receive a medical screening to determine inadmissibility on health grounds.11 Specific health-related conditions that pose a threat to public health (called Class A conditions) are grounds for inadmissibility when identified during the medical examination overseas. One class A condition is pandemic flu. New diseases can be added to the list by executive order of the president of the United States. President Trump has yet to update that list with the Covid-19 virus.

Quarantine regulations apply to everyone trying to enter the United States — whether legally or illegally — including refugees. Federal isolation and quarantine are authorized for several communicable diseases, including “severe acute respiratory syndromes; and influenza caused by novel or re-emerging influenza viruses that are causing, or have the potential to cause, a pandemic.”12 (Emphasis added.)

There is no indication that refugees are being tested for the Covid-19 virus overseas or placed under quarantine upon arrival. We know, for instance, that no special pre-departure Covid-19 precautions or testing seem to have been put in place for those refugees coming from Manus Island and Nauru. When asked about this issue, the Australian Home Affairs spokesperson remained vague, referring to general U.S. mandated pre-departure preparations. Father Giorgio Licini, the general secretary of the Catholic Bishops Conference of Papua New Guinea & Solomon Islands, said that “the men did not undergo coronavirus isolation in preparation for their departure.”13 We can assume this to be true of all refugees admitted during this crisis.

But even if they were, why welcome thousands of refugees in the midst of a health and economic crisis?Especially when we know that, on top of being vulnerable to the Covid-19 virus, refugees have specific health needs since they usually come from situations of poor hygienic conditions and health systems with a wide range of unmet health needs (including nutritional deficiencies, hepatitis B infection, tuberculosis infection, parasitosis, etc.) and mental health concerns such as alcohol and drug abuse.14 These health concerns can strain U.S. health and social systems, which are already overwhelmed because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Resettlement agency representatives determine where refugees are resettled in the United States (usually, and for practical reasons, in states that host their local affiliates). They decide in which state to place a refugee, officially, in an attempt “to match the particular needs of each incoming refugee with the specific resources available in U.S. communities.”15 But how can states like New York, Michigan, and others (who had to deal with stringent stay-at-home orders, large numbers of Covid-19 cases and deaths, rising unemployment, and limited medical capacity and resources such as hospital beds, ventilators, testing etc.) embrace the arrival of refugees into their communities? Were state and local health officials notified of the placement of refugees? Were state residents — who are being asked to continue making enormous sacrifices — informed of such arrivals and risks?

Moreover, how can refugees achieve “self-sufficiency” in the United States when states are just now coming out of lock-down, businesses are going bankrupt, and the employment situation for both immigrants (legal and illegal) and the native-born is disastrous following April and May employment figures?16 Are they just to rely on parts of the relief funds and resources of the CARES Act that are made available to refugees?

[….]

This report will cover the following points:

Refugee arrivals by nationality and destination since the creation of the president’s Coronavirus Taskforce;

Timeline of announcements by world health authorities and the U.S. government in response to Covid-19;

Placement of refugees in American communities: who gets to decide in which states refugees are resettled;

State and local say in the resettlement process, especially when state residents are asked to make important sacrifices amid a health and economic crisis;

Medical screening of refugees before and after resettlement: inadmissibility to the United States on health-related grounds, overseas medical examination of refugees to determine admissibility, domestic medical examination for newly arriving refugees in the United States, medical examination for adjustment of status;

Refugees’ specific health needs;

Access to healthcare and benefits in the United States; and
Relief funds and resources available to refugees following the CARES Act.

You know intuitively that this is insane—welcoming poor/unhealthy people to America right now—but, if you are looking for some facts go here to read Rush’s whole heavily-footnoted report.

Refugee Resettlement Watch is 13 years old today!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment
This is the artwork the Southern Poverty Law Center commissioned when they labeled me an ant-Muslim extremist in 2016. https://refugeeresettlementwatch.org/2018/04/20/splc-takes-down-their-field-guide-to-anti-muslim-extremists/

It’s kind of crazy isn’t it—for 13 years I’ve been working to inform the American public about the US Refugee Admissions Program on almost a daily basis.  I say almost because as many of you know the speech police succeeded in forcing RRW off the internet about this time last year for a brief period.

I’m too lazy to write anything new.  What do I say? When I started this effort in the summer of 2007 I assumed it was something that would last a few months.  9,487 posts later, I’m still doing this!

So, because I am lazy and want to get onto the news of the day, I figured I would post my ‘About’ page here because I suspect most of you don’t visit RRW directly and may not have ever seen it.

About RRW…..

Prior to 2007 I had no interest in the refugee issue, heck, I had no idea there even was any controversy.

Of course I knew there were refugees moving around the world, but I had no clue that the US government was actively working with the United Nations to select refugees from third world countries and then was quietly placing them in small and medium-sized cities in most of the fifty states.

That is, until a stir was created in the rural county where I live in Western Maryland.

To make a very long story short, I learned that the Virginia Council of Churches , working for New York City-based Church World Service, had been quietly placing refugees in our county.

I wanted to know if the people of Washington County had any say in the matter, and who told a Virginia church group that they could place an economic burden on a Maryland! county that had a lot of burdens already.

Our local paper, the Herald Mail, had no interest in explaining to our citizens how the program, which I had just learned was the US State Department’s US Refugee Admissions Program, worked.  I implored the paper to investigate and report facts to help tamp down a growing anger as more people had questions about how the decision was made and who would pay for the needs of the impoverished refugees.

Click here for a post I wrote in 2007 explaining how I asked the Herald Mail to publish a thorough report on the refugee program.  I think you will see that the questions I asked were reasonable and ones any sensible person would ask.

Ultimately a public meeting was held, Hagerstown city and Washington County citizens were not happy, and within weeks the US State Department sent the Virginia Council of Churches back to Virginia.

All of that history (and subsequent mentions of those early days) is cataloged in a category I called ‘September Forum’ for anyone who is interested in the history.

I launched Refugee Resettlement Watch in July 2007 simply as a place to archive everything I was learning (after the Herald Mail refused to inform citizens) about a subject that had so intrigued me.

If you are new to RRW, you need to know that I don’t work for anyone!  And, I am not paid for my volunteer work!

I’m just a citizen who believes that taxpaying Americans have every right to know how a government program works and so have spent the last 12 13 years (writing almost every day!) on this one very dysfunctional and frankly destructive program.

By the way, I didn’t start out thinking the program itself was dangerous for the future of our country, I was initially only concerned with how dysfunctional and unfair it is.

Unfair because local people had no say in how their community was being changed by bureaucrats in Washington!

I have nearly 9,000 posts [today it is 9,487] archived here in which I explain the program, educate about what is happening around the US, and report on refugee problems around the world.

Then in late 2018, I became discouraged.

After the President had been in office for nearly two years, I didn’t see the major reforms being initiated that I had hoped for.  Yes, he drastically cut the numbers of refugees arriving, but he left the structure of the program firmly in place.

And, he signaled that no major changes would be made by continuing to fund all nine federal refugee contractors (like the arrogant and politically Progressive Church World Service responsible for refugee placement in my county) even as they had many fewer refugees to ‘care for.’

I posited, and still do, that if no major reform of the program is made during Trump’s tenure in the White House, the program will be put on steroids as soon as he is gone. [Biden is eager to make that happen, see here yesterday.]

Indeed, the refugee industry will demand of the new President that the numbers being admitted should be increased tenfold to make up for what they will call the “lost Trump years.”

In the fall of 2018, I figured it was time for me to do something else, so at the first of the year (2019), I launched a new blog—Frauds, Crooks and Criminals—in order to write about a broader range of issues that appealed to me.

If I was going to write every day, I figured I might as well have fun!

Although relatively inactive, Refugee Resettlement Watch was still available for citizens seeking an education about the refugee program, or so I thought!

In June of 2019 the blow came—a reader reported that RRW had been taken down!

I had no warning from my host of more than a decade— WordPress.com—which was destroying years of my work, and when I inquired they refused to tell me why now, after nearly 12 years of using their services, I was being kicked off of their platform.

This is censorship, plain and simple. I wrote about it here at ‘Frauds and Crooks.’

It was obvious that the speech police had finally found me as the Leftists and Open Borders Agitators (in the run-up to the 2020 elections) go about silencing anyone with views other than theirs—anyone who isn’t supportive of their mission of changing America by changing the people.

WordPress.com allowed me access to my posts in order to host my own blog, but I was not provided access to my subscribers or sadly not to most of my photos, graphs and charts that illustrated my posts.

I needed help!  What did I know about taking a hodge-podge of nearly 9,000 posts and putting them all back into some usable format?

However, thanks to help from Elbel Consulting Services, LLC, I rebuilt the blog and am hosting it on a secure server. I’m back!

Thanks for being here with me!

See my ‘Welcome Back’ post when I relaunched RRW on September 2, 2019.

Endnote:  Perhaps the greatest casualty of being removed without notice from the internet was my subscriber list.  Prior to being censored, I had thousands of subscribers.  WordPress.com did not give them back to me.  RRW is also increasingly hard to find via search engines so rebuilding a readership is a daunting task.

Biden Says He Will Beat Obama’s Refugee Admissions Record!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

“Barack Obama’s immigration legacy was not, in fact, anything to celebrate,” says Slate

Apparently Biden made the announcement on World Refugee Day, June 20th.

That, according to the Leftist website ‘Slate:’

How Biden Plans to Undo Trump’s Nativist Agenda

In a little-noticed announcement, the former vice president committed to a more ambitious refugee policy than existed under Obama.

After a laundry list of all of the evil doin’s of President Trump (with Stephen Miller’s help), Slate reporter Dahlia Lithwick goes on to say:

Undoing this damage will be a heavy lift for whoever next occupies the Oval Office, but there is some cause for optimism.

Last Sunday, on World Refugee Day, Joe Biden laid out how he would reverse Trump’s assault by committing to several essential immigration actions: Having pledged that if he is elected he will restore “America’s historic role as leader in resettlement and defending the rights of refugees everywhere,” Biden had set specific targets that will increase refugee resettlement in the United States.

His plan would aim to admit 125,000 refugees to the U.S. (that’s up from a ceiling of 18,000 under Trump, and more than Obama admitted). In his announcement last week, he added a new pledge: to work with Congress to establish a minimum admissions number of at least 95,000 refugees annually.

In addition to those actions, Biden has promised to:

pursue policies that increase opportunities for faith and local communities to sponsor refugee resettlement. I will make more channels, such as higher education visas, available to those seeking safety. I will repeal the Muslim ban—and other discriminatory bans based on ethnicity and nationality—and restore asylum laws, including ending the horrific practice of separating families at our border. I will work with our allies and partners to stand against China’s assault on Hong Kong’s freedoms and mass detention and repression of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities and support a pathway for those persecuted to find safe haven in the United States and other nations.

This is how we always get beat by the Left.  They are proactively working to change the Refugee Act of 1980 to make it harder for any president in the future to reduce the number of refugees to be admitted.

Where is our side in Congress?  There is no one that I know of working to pull the debate in the direction of greater restrictions and protections for towns and cities who might be inundated with more impoverished people.

Slate continues….

The proposal mirrors the plan set forth in the Refugee Protection Act of 2019, now pending a vote in the House of Representatives. It signals that Biden isn’t just running against Trump’s anti-Muslim, anti-refugee, anti-immigrant dog whistles, but is also committing energy and, more importantly, resources to fulfilling the United States’ reputation as a nation that welcomes those in need of shelter, and also to making the U.S. government a central player in solving a global refugee crisis that has only grown more exigent as a result of COVID-19. It signals that Biden understands that solving the refugee crisis is both a hefty administrative lift and a moral and democratic imperative.

Obama’s immigration legacy nothing to celebrate, suggests Joe!

Also notable is that Biden isn’t seeking to simply return to Obama-era policies, but is going further, faster, in a tacit statement that Barack Obama’s immigration legacy was not, in fact, anything to celebrate.

Should Biden win the White House in 2020, he will face an administrative state that has been hollowed out from within. The government agencies tasked with refugee resettlement will need to be rebuilt to do the work of meeting the 125,000 refugee admission target, and as we learned in the Obama era, even with a Democrat in the White House, refugees have been a constituency with little power or pull.

But the commitment to work with Congress to create a new floor on refugee admissions is the truly radical aspect of Biden’s new pledge. It would mean that whoever takes office in future could not do what Trump and Stephen Miller did and set a future ceiling at 18,000 or even lower, because there would be legislation in place to preclude it.

If nothing else, these past four years have revealed what kind of statutory protections refugees will require to prevent another Trump-like presidency from closing America’s doors again.

More here.

So for all of you asking me ‘what do we do?’  You need to work to re-elect Donald Trump as I said in November of 2019.  If Biden wins there will be nothing more for me to do. I don’t plan to chronicle into my dotage the cultural and economic death of our country.

Road Block to Open Borders Strategy as Supremes Give Trump a Victory in Asylum Case

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

“I would say that asylum by now pretty much exists in name only.” 

(Doris Meissner)

Normally I don’t write about news that you are seeing everywhere except if I can add some bits of information that you haven’t heard about (unless you are a longtime reader of Refugee Resettlement Watch, that is!).

Donald Trump is wrecking havoc on the asylum system that the Open Borders industry has been relying on for more than a decade to admit ever larger numbers of migrants/refugees to America because the industry knew that the normal Refugee Admissions Program couldn’t change America fast enough.

Just so you know the heretofore primary UN/US refugee program involves the selection of refugees who are supposedly being persecuted and flies them to America.

The other side of the program, created in 1980 with the help of people like Doris Meissner, involves the asylum process where migrants arrive at our borders or on flights into the country and then claim asylum. If found to have a legitimate fear of being persecuted if returned to their home country, they are granted asylum and given all the taxpayer-funded goodies that chosen refugees are getting.

Ten years ago I learned that Open Borders Inc. was shifting its focus to the asylum process in order to change America by changing the people at a more rapid rate than the normal refugee process provided them. (Nevermind that at the time, we were admitting 80,000 or so refugees in any given year!)

But before I get to that….

Here is Nina Totenberg writing at NPR about the case that gave Trump a rare victory in the courts last week.

Supreme Court Sides With Trump Administration In Asylum Cases

The U.S. Supreme Court handed the Trump administration a major victory on a signature issue Thursday, ruling that asylum-seekers whose claims are initially denied by immigration officials have no right to a hearing before a judge.

DC Swamp reporter Nina Totenberg

The decision authorizes the Trump administration to fast-track deportations for thousands of asylum-seekers after bare-bones screening procedures.

Immigrants who make a claim for asylum must initially prove to immigration officials that they have a “credible fear” of persecution in their country of origin to proceed with the full asylum process. If they fail, they can be deported without ever having the opportunity to make their case in court.

That’s what happened to Vijayakumar Thuraissigiam, the subject of the case. Thuraissigiam is a Sri Lankan farmer who sought asylum, telling immigration officials that he had been abducted from his fields, arrested, blindfolded by men in a van, interrogated and beaten so badly with wooden sticks that he spent 11 days in the hospital.

Thuraissigiam is Tamil, an ethnic minority that has long been persecuted by the majority Sinhalese government in Sri Lanka. His abduction fits a pattern of similar violence carried out against Tamils there. After he fled his country, he journeyed for seven months to get first to Mexico and then the United States to seek asylum.

“Fits a pattern” because he had the story spoon fed to him by some immigration lawyers?

Thuraissigiam’s case illustrates the speed of expedited deportation proceedings that have become routine. Following a quick hearing with no lawyer present, an immigration officer said he believed Thuraissigiam’s account of the violence he suffered but ultimately denied his claim for asylum because Thuraissigiam could not specify who arrested him or why.

Is that because someone had fed him the story to recite and they forgot, or he was too dumb to remember, some key elements of his made-up persecution tale?

Doris Meissner, working to change America for 4 decades!

And, does no one ever ask where on earth a poor Tamil ‘farmer’ got the money for a seven-month journey to the US border?

Nevermind, that legitimate asylum seekers are to ask for asylum in the first safe country they enter.  How many countries had he already passed through before getting to the US/Mexican border?

Nina of the swamp then quotes Doris of the swamp:

Doris Meissner, who served in top positions at the Immigration and Naturalization Service during the Reagan and Clinton administrations, twice heading up the department, said that Thursday’s ruling is not a significant departure from past practices. But she added that the way the Trump administration has carried out the screening of asylum-seekers has been a dramatic departure from practices in previous administrations, effectively making it impossible for people to win asylum in even the most dire situations.

“I would say that asylum by now pretty much exists in name only,” she said.

More here.

Donald Trump has put a serious roadblock in Meissner & Company plans to use the asylum process to speed up the diversification of America.

The peanut farmer signed the Refugee Act into law, but Kennedy and Biden were behind it.

In 2010 I attended the ‘celebration’ marking the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Refugee Act of 1980 by Jimmy Carter.

The attendees at Georgetown Law School were very much focused on the asylum system as they stated forthrightly that the normal refugee process wasn’t bringing in enough of the third world.

(By the way, this surprised me.  In 2010 I was only three years into learning about the Refugee Resettlement Program and so this giddy focus on asylum came as a surprise to me.)

Meissner, speaking at the event, specifically chortled that when they crafted (meaning she was in on the crafting) of the Refugee Act, they had anticipated the odd ballet dancer from Russia asking for asylum, but had not dreamed of the numbers that were beginning to use the system.

Her delight at the increasing asylum numbers was evident.

Here is just one of many mentions I have made about that 2010 event, Meissner and the asylum process.  In that 2011 post I called for a Congressional investigation (ha! ha!) of the fraud I believed was happening with asylum claims and NGO lawyers.

French Author Jean Raspail has Died at Age 95

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

He died from the Chinese virus.

Invasion of Europe news….

If you don’t know about Raspail or have never read his 1973 novel, The Camp of the Saints, you must.

Yikes! See the price of this book now! https://www.amazon.com/Camp-Saints-Jean-Raspail-ebook/dp/B00QKNDV9S

Actually even mention of the book, banned in some parts of the world, could bring the speech police down on RRW again just as it approaches its 13th anniversary.  (It was this time last year that they succeeded in shutting down RRW for a few months.)

Chronicles has published an excellent obituary about the man who told the truth nearly a half century before most see it now—western civilization is committing suicide by ‘welcoming’ mass migration from the third world.

You might have noticed how mention of the novel by Trump adviser Stephen Miller caused the Left (specifically the Southern Poverty Law Center and its media sycophants) to melt down last year, see here at NPR.

Below is a bit of an obituary for the “thinker” by Srdja Trifkovic at Chronicles:

(emphasis is mine)

The great and good French novelist and thinker Jean Raspail died on June 13, three weeks short of his 95th birthday. I was deeply saddened by the news, although at his age it was to be expected. It is ironic that he succumbed to the COVID-19 virus, the product and totemic symbol of our age and the globalized world, both of which he loathed with a passion.

[….]

Marine Le Pen

In Camp of the Saints, his best-known work, Raspail castigated the “submersion” of France by the landing of a fleet of derelict boats from India loaded with refugees. The rest of the grim story is known to Chronicles readers, or should be.

“We must reread The Camp of the Saints, which, beyond evoking with a talented pen the migratory perils, had—long before [Michel Houellebecq’s] Submission—mercilessly described the submission of our elites,” tweeted Marine Le Pen in tribute to Raspail.  In addition to his resolute stand against all Third World—but especially Muslim—immigration, and in line with his traditionalist understanding of Catholicism, Raspail condemned communism and capitalism with equal force, as the two monstrous twins born of modernity.

[….]

In his final years—almost five decades after publishing his prophetic dystopia—Jean Raspail was resigned that our civilization is on the “road to disappearance.” As he explained in an interview published in Valeurs Actuelles in 2013, he had no desire to join the massive circle of intellectuals who spend their time debating immigration because, in his view, such talk is useless:

The people already intuitively know that France, as our ancestors shaped her over the centuries, is on the road to disappearance. The audience is being kept amused by endless talk about immigration, but the final truth is never stated. 

[….]

What can be done? Raspail’s verdict was clear:

There are only two ways to deal with immigrants. Either we accommodate them, and France—her culture, her civilization—will be eradicated without so much as a funeral. In my view, that is what is going to happen. Or else we do not accommodate them at all, which means we stop sanctifying the Other and rediscover our neighbors.

Jean Raspail will be sorely missed by all Frenchmen and other Europeans who refuse to go gently into the multicultural night.

More here.

There couldn’t be a better time in world history, as the heathen hordes (of various hues!) run wild in the streets of the civilized world, erasing history and attempting to silence anyone who disagrees with them through intimidation and fear, to read The Camp of the Saints.

See my entire ‘Invasion of Europe’ archive.